Culture, Art and Technology - UCSD podcast review

One of the most exciting lecture series has kicked off: UCSD's CAT 2, Culture, Art and Technology. Last year, I was alerted to this course by DIY Scholar, but once I subscribed, the course had nearly finished. Before I knew it, UCSD took it off line and I had only a few unrelated lectures to go on. It goes to show how important it is, when you decide to try a course on UCSD, to download all lectures as soon as possible and store them for later use.

The feed delivers at this point two files, lecture 1 and lecture 2. Lecture 1 is empty and lecture 2 is actually the first encounter. Professor Tal Golan, who delivers the course, uses this lecture, as do so many other instructors, to introduce the assistants and go over a range of household issues relevant only to the students in the room. By Lecture 3 it will become much more exciting.

It is worthwhile to endure the largely superfluous content of this lecture, nevertheless, because Golan gives a few teasers to warm you up. He does not however define the course as such. It is probably not so easy to define. To call it a history of thought, or a dialectic of knowledge and culture, or the parallel of knowledge construction and social construction, makes it sound fancy, but have a certain level of abstraction that it also either covers too little or too much. Golan avoids such terminology and throws a couple of examples to challenge and entice the audience. How could Aristotle be influential for 2500 years, when science and thought has always reinvented itself (and most thinkers? Why was the switch to a heliocentric picture of the universe so important? By all means this is going to be a thrilling, if challenging, ride of wonder, of a whole different way of looking at the construction of culture.

About the previous course:
The dialectic of knowledge and culture.

Classical eras in MMW 2 - UCSD history podcast

Enjoying the history lectures of the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) has a certain immediacy to it. In an unaltered way one gets the lectures; they are recorded automatically and put on-line without any further editing. And by the end of the quarter, the lectures are taken off line again. So, you have to be there, as it were. Deep down, you don't because you can set your podcatcher to store any content that comes out and you may even do some editing yourself (I know of nobody who does it, although cutting away the silences, would improve the files greatly at little investment of time). Even if the podcast when it fades, loses its title in iTunes, your content is still there, to be enjoyed when and where you want - as is the strength of podcast.

And there is something to be enjoyed. This quarter the second part of world history, MMW 2, the Making of the Modern World over the time of around 2000 BC to 100 AD is being taught by Charles Chamberlain. He makes a point of it to argue in favor of using the abbreviations BC and AD, by the way - if it matters all that much. I loved Chamberlain in MMW 3, last year and he is off to a good start already. Though you can choose to skip the first lecture, it is mainly administrative. (MMW 2 - The Great Classical Traditions)

Aside from the superfluous content for podcast listeners, Chamberlain spends some words of explaining his perspective and terminology and I liked being filled out on that point. The MMW-series is different from other podcast series in that it takes western and non-western history together for each era that is being covered. The result is a refreshing and much wider take on history. What has so far struck me is that in spite of separation, so much added insight is had by seeing the parallels. This time we are in for exactly that kind of a treat again as Chamberlain argues that all major (at least three) world cultural traditions had their classical stage during the MMW 2 stretch of time. So we will be seeing the coming of age of them all. I am loving it already.

More MMW:
MMW 4 (Herbst),
MMW 6,
MMW 3 (Herbst),
MMW 3 (Chamberlain).

Darwin Special - In Our Time podcasts

Here is a quick post to alert you to the fact BBC's In Our Time has started a 4 part series about Darwin . The parts are being podcast in fast succession. Pick them up, as they come in, on the regular In Our Time feed.

Yesterday I downloaded the first issue in which Melvyn Bragg takes us to Cambridge to talk about Darwin's early life. When he was a squire that did not stand out too much and bound to become a rural parson with time on his hands to dabble a bit in natural science. Nothing seemed to indicate he was going to make such a lasting mark on the sciences.

Today already the second podcast has come round and it will address the journey on the Beagle and bring us closer to Darwin the revolutionary.

More In Our Time:
The Consolation of Philosophy,
The Great Fire,
Heat,
Baroque,
Neuroscience.

Self help with PTSD - Wise Counsel podcast

Post traumatic stress disorder is not exclusively a syndrome for war veterans and terrorist victims. On the Wise Counsel Podcast Victoria Lemle Beckner explains PTSD can be caused by any traumatic event, like for example a car accident. What is important is to recognize the symptoms and she goes through great lengths explaining them.

The therapies for PTSD she suggests are CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), approaches from Positive Psychology and Awareness techniques. When interviewer David van Nuys asks about other therapies, as far as she can address them, her argument boils down to claiming that CBT covers the same. CBT's function is to reconnect to the traumatic event and reduce the amount of stress, anxiety and retreat is caused by it. Positive Psychology helps in that it taps into the strong points of the client and the contribution of Awareness techniques is that it learns people to accept certain feelings in themselves. The whole of her work is laid down in a book that provides a self-help strategy for PTSD.

One may wonder whether an intense syndrome such as PTSD is apt for self-help, but at least Lemle's work will help patients on track. Van Nuys's questions are spot-on as usual and the quality of the podcats will only be increased if you are a regular listener to Wise Counsel and his other podcast Shrink Rap Radio - in that case you know exactly where the questions come from.

More Wise Counsel:
Wise Counsel - psychology podcast review,
Irvin Yalom,
David H. Barlow,
Richard Heimberg,
Tony Madrid.

And:
Shrink Rap Radio on PTSD with war veterans.

My player needs replacement

I need to buy a new digital audio player. I have been using a 1GB iPod nano since 2006 and it is near dead. The battery is empty ever faster and sometimes doesn't even allow me more than ten minutes of continuous listening. I am using every trick in the book to use as little battery as possible (and there are a good number of those, disabling back light as the most important one), but at best I can listen for two, three hours with the battery constantly in the red, threatening to choke the player any minute. And when it revives, all the playback positions are gone and all podcasts dropped out of the playlists (why? Beats me).

Some research around shops (on-line and in actual buildings where you have to physically go to) begins to point to a pretty well established conclusion: for a podcast listener such as myself, the next player should be the next generation of the iPod nano. That is, however, a lot of money for more features than I care to use. Is there really no player out there that can connect to a podcatcher, play podcasts, remember their playback position?

Is the ever growing amount of university content that comes in m4a format and should be had through iTunes U yet another indicator that the iPod has a monopoly on the kind of audio I want? What about those poor students? Must they invest in the top shelve audio player for their studies?

Any suggestions out there?

The consolation of philosophy - In Our Time

BBC's In Our Time skipped a week around Christmas, but came around immediately on the first day of the new year. The last issue before that, about the physics of time, was also very worthwhile. However, as has happened more often when IOT touched upon science, the subject went a little bit over my head and I have hard time saying too much about it. The questions whether time is really existent and whether this is independent or dependent of space and whether it could flow backwards, or may even be entirely an illusion, are questions that the program started with and had me wondering just as much by the end.

This week's subject, the consolation of philosophy, although by many means a large subject, reaching long and wide just as the previous one, had a couple of more anchors for me. It ended very heavily with Albert Camus, whose work I have studied extensively in the past. Camus'answer whether philosophy is of any consolation towards the absurdity of life, is not so clear and it slightly bothered me, he was, once again, categorized as an existentialist. Even IOT's own program about Camus, tried to repair that common misplacement - and unsuccessfully so, as it turns out.

Where the end point was Camus, the beginning point was the 6th century Roman thinker Boethius who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy a work that outlasted him and was to influence thinkers up until Camus. In this use of the word philosophy is included also literature and poetry (as one needs to read Camus' novels to understand him and Boethius uses poetry in his books) and in many ways is therefore also, as I see it, an issue for secularism as opposed to religion: in how far does human thinking, whether philosophic theory or art, is capable to offer consolation in life, just as well, or even better than, the religions.

More In Our Time:
The Great Fire,
Heat,
Baroque,
Neuroscience,
Simon Bolivar.